A great web design is essential for many reasons. It not only help you to get better look of your web site but also help you to get better ranking in search engines (hence more and more visitors). Nowadays, web designers are doing little extra than just designing a website that addresses their clients needs. They are now more concerned with search engine optimization (SEO). Any web design have some implications on SEO and that is the good reason for any web designers to incorporate SEO principles and factors in designing search engine (SE) friendly websites. Due to increased competition in web design industry, it becomes too much important to incorporate principles of SEO in designing websites to survive.
After some discussion with some designer, we surprised after concluding that many of them even don’t know about SEO and few answered that they don’t think considering SEO in web designing is necessary or required. Web designers who have no knowledge or not considered it important could not make effective web design that could get visibility in search engines. If you have little knowledge about SEO, we highly recommend you to read this articles: What is SEO ?
The aim of this article is to provide some important SEO tips that will help web designers to build more search engine friendly web design and to develop and improve SEO skills. But before we want to explain some common SEO mistakes made by most web designers.
Common SEO Mistakes Made by Web Designers:
1. Welcome Page
A big mistakes made by many people who make a welcome page that appear when their site load and place a link that redirect to the main page of their site. Home pages get high page ranks and will not crawled if there is no proper structure of internal linking. Welcome (home) page having link in flash objects make impossible for search engines spiders to follow that link and make it a bad practice.
2. Flash Navigation Menus
A common mistake made by many designers is use of flash navigation menus. Flash menus may look nice but make difficult for spiders to follow those links.
3. Use Of Images Instead Of Text
Every designer want to give a better look to its web design and sometimes it leads to negative SEO implications. Designer tend to focus on design itself and not think about SEO and thus replace text that make overall design ugly with eye catching and cool images to attract visitors. Search engine spiders cannot read text in images and hence cannot follow those contents.
To get a better search engine friendly design, designers should try to avoid these mistakes. This will also make it possible for professional designers to survive in this competitive industry.
SEO Tips For Web Designers:
1.Externalize JavaScript and CSS
When coding a website, place JavaScript and CSS codes externally. Placing them internally make crawling process slower than externalizing JavaScript and CSS. Spiders read website through its HTML document and if JavaScript and CSS are contained within HTML document, they will lead to additional lines of codes in HTML document.
2.Use Of Readable Content
When designing a website, designer should always make a proper structure of content. Well structured content that is readable will enable spiders to crawl your website easily and quickly. Proper planning in web design and considering above SEO mistakes when designing, will make your web design search engine friendly and will increase chances to get higher ranking in search engines.
3. Use Of SEO friendly Navigation Menus
As we already explained in mistakes heading that don’t use flash menus or images instead of text that spiders can’t read, there is another good solution that designer should use which is the use of CSS background images instead of text. Basically use of SEO friendly navigation menus means you create a good sturcture so that spiders can follow. By using CSS background images to replace text spiders can easily read that content and can follow those links.
4. Select the Right Keywords
Keywords are important but right keywords should be selected because they describe your content. You should use keywords but you are not allow to abuse keywords, in other words, your web page should not be loaded with keywords in the meta tags of your web page. You could be penalized for keyword stuffing if you are going to abuse your keywords. Always remember that keyword stuffing is an unethical practice, so you should use but select (minimum) right keywords.
5. Right Keywords on Right Places
As selection of right keywords is important, place right keyword on a right place is also important. Keywords for different targets should be placed on different but on appropriate places. Best places are: title tag, meta description and keywords, H1, H2 and H3 tags, Alt text and so on…
6. Domain Should Be Related With Your Keyword Phrase
Get domain name which is most related with your target keyword phrase. Domain name that is same as your keyword and niche, is a good mean to optimize for that keyword phrase. Having your keyword phrase in your domain will help in your rankings as well.
7. Use Search Engine Friendly URLs
Search engine friendly URLs are those URLs that contains those keywords that best describe your content of the page. These search engine friendly URLs are not only useful to the search engines but to your visitors too.
8. Create Informative Error 404 page
Error 404 page help to redirect visitor (who landed on 404 pages) back to the home page. Well designed Error 404 page will minimize the risk of loosing visitors landed on 404 page.
9. Always use Alt & Title Tags
Many people forget to add the Alt tag attributes to images so always put Alt tags attributes to your images to describe your image. Same case for Title tags, always put proper title tags. Search engines without these tags will be unable to know about your image because search engine can’t see your image. They just follow these tags.
10. Page Speed Matters
Google is now incorporating page speed in its search rankings and hence it becomes a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. So designers should consider it as an important factor and should ensure that their site loads quickly. Pretty code structure will ensure website loads quickly.
If you know some other SEO tips that you think are important for web designers, share with us through the comments section below.
